Barnes and Noble released a new program last year called PubIT, which allowed independant authors to create eBooks and have them listed in the Barnes and Noble eBook store. The PubIt program has been a resounding success and recently hit the 11,000 published works milestone and 35 of these are in the top 200 best sellers. Barnes and Noble has staged various events featuring the authors themselves and giving prospective authors a chance to engage in a Q and A.
The first event kicked off today at the Santa Monica location featuring H.P. Mallory, Beth Orsoff, a traditional turned self-published author who has boosted her sales with PubIt!, and Lisa Cortés, President of Cortés Films and Executive Producer of the Academy Award-winning film Precious. There will be more events like this in the feature, so stay tuned for more information.
The next event at Barnes and Noble will occur on February 26, consumers who visit any of Barnes & Noble’s more than 700 stores and take a guided tour of Nook Color with a bookseller will get a free tall cup of hot or iced fresh-brewed Starbucks coffee in the Barnes & Noble Café.
We have covered PubIT extensively throughout its closed beta to the official release in October of 2011. The program is very solid and easy to use if you have done your written work on a popular word processor. You can use RTF, DOC, TXT and other file-types to the very popular ePUB format. Every Barnes and Noble E-Reader launched to date supports this format and so does popular other ones including Sony, Kobo and Pandigital. Once you submit your book and make a Pubit account you can submit your content and within 24 to 72 hours later you can be an officially launched author. Although creating your book is the first step and in order to have it sell you should invest some time in self promotion, creating a facebook page, and your own press releases.
“The variety and quality of the content we are seeing through PubIt! is beyond our expectations,” said Theresa Horner, Barnes & Noble’s Vice President, Digital Content. “We are thrilled with our initial sales for PubIt! titles as our millions of customers enjoy exploring newly added works from PubIt! writers and publishers.”
It is very impressive that Barnes and Noble has been able to attract over 11,000 authors and aspiring writers to submit content through their system that is barely 4 months old. Some authors in particular have had some great success. H.P. Mallory, author of Toil and Trouble, Fire Burn and Cauldron Bubble, and To Kill a Warlock, calls PubIt!, “an incredible experience…one of the best decisions I ever made.” Mallory’s paranormal romance books have become such a hit that she just signed a three-book deal with a major publishing house.
Hopefully Barnes and Noble continues to showcase their authors and have more artist panels at their various locations. Not only will it draw attention to their digital publishing initiative but it would give an advantage to the company that Amazon cannot provide. Barnes and Noble is taking advantage of their tangible retail spaces and large book stores, that are a great place to showcase their own authors and build their brand internally. Meanwhile Amazon has a virtual website only and cannot put its own authors in the forefront, while their Digital Text Platform continues to be THE most popular self authoring program on the internet. If B&N can continue to the momentum of this event into future ones it could very well double the 11,000 authors using the program in another four months.
Learn more about the PubIT program here
via B&N Events
Michael Kozlowski is the editor-in-chief at Good e-Reader and has written about audiobooks and e-readers for the past fifteen years. Newspapers and websites such as the CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times have picked up his articles. He Lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
